Time::Mock(3)

NAME
Time::Mock - shift and scale time

SYNOPSIS
Speed up your sleep(), alarm(), and time() calls.

  use Time::Mock throttle => 100;
  use Your::Code;

ABOUT
Test::MockTime is nice, but doesn't allow you to accelerate the timestep and doesn't deal with Time::HiRes or give you any way to change the time across forks.

TODO: replace Time::HiRes functions with wrappers

TODO: finish the interfaces to real time/sleep/alarm

Replaces
These core functions are replaced.

Eventually, much of the same bits from Time::HiRes will be correspondingly overwritten.

time
localtime
gmtime
sleep
    Sleeps for 1/$throttle.

alarm
    Alarm happens in 1/$throttle.

Class Methods
These are the knobs on your time machine, but note that it is probably best to adjust them only once: see caveats. For convenience, import() takes will call these methods with each key in its argument list.

  perl -MTime::Mock=throttle,600,set,"2009-11-01 00:59" dst_bug.pl

  throttle
Get or set the throttle.

  Time::Mock->throttle(10_000);

  offset
Get or set the offset.

  Time::Mock->offset(120);

  set
Set the time to a given value. This may be a numeric time or anything parseable by Date::Parse::str2time() (you need to install Date::Parse to enable this.)

  Time::Mock->set("2009-11-01 00:59");

Caveats
This package remembers the actual system time when it was loaded and makes adjustments from there.

Future versions might change this behavior if I can think of a good reason and scheme for that.

  forks and threads
The throttle value will hold across forks, but there is no support for propagating changes to child processes. So, set the knobs only before you fork!

Don't ask about threads unless you're asking about me applying your patch thanks.

  Networking and System stuff
We're only lying about the clock inside of Perl, not magically messing with the universe.

  Time Travel is Dangerous
I suggest that you set the knobs at import() and don't mess with them after that unless you're well aware of how your code is using time.

Messing with the throttle during runtime could also give your code the illusion of time going backwards. If your code tries to do math with the return values of time() before and after a slow-down, there could be trouble.

Changing the throttle while an alarm() is set won't change the original alarm time. There would be a similar caveat about sleep() if I hadn't already mentioned forks ;-)

Finally, don't ever let your past self see your future self.

AUTHOR
Eric Wilhelm @ <ewilhelm at cpan dot org>

http://scratchcomputing.com/

BUGS
If you found this module on CPAN, please report any bugs or feature requests through the web interface at <http://rt.cpan.org>. I will be notified, and then you'll automatically be notified of progress on your bug as I make changes.

If you pulled this development version from my /svn/, please contact me directly.

COPYRIGHT
Copyright (C) 2008 Eric L. Wilhelm, All Rights Reserved.

NO WARRANTY
Absolutely, positively NO WARRANTY, neither express or implied, is offered with this software. You use this software at your own risk. In case of loss, no person or entity owes you anything whatsoever. You have been warned.

LICENSE
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.